Monya Rowe Gallery is happy to announce a solo exhibition of recent artwork by way of Bryan Rogers titled Forest.
“Simply sooner than the pandemic, I moved to South Orange, NJ. I beloved the structure and historical past, particularly the put up administrative center and its’ WPA-commissioned mural [The Works Progress Administration was created by President Roosevelt in 1935, during one of the bleakest years of the Great Depression]. The mural’s painter was once Bernard Perlin. Perlin’s tableaux was once an idealized, symbolic slice of lifetime of the local people. I used to be impressed by way of the mural’s formal qualities, in addition to the paradoxical stress and placidity of the lads depicted. I sought after to do my very own tackle determine and panorama portray, and used Perlin’s mural as a scaffold of an concept to construct my very own global.
“Being queer is intrinsic to my dating to the sector, how I have interaction with other folks, and the paintings I make. My figures are an amalgam of middle-aged queer males with whom I’m maximum acquainted/familial: myself, my brother, and my spouse. The lads in my artwork are nude. Their nudity returns them to an animalistic state. They aren’t predators — I recall to mind them as like deer transferring during the woods or goldfish in an aquarium. They don’t take into consideration how foolish and susceptible they may well be, they usually stay this manner so long as they retain to their enclosures.” —Bryan Rogers, New Jersey, 2022